War of the Worlds fan mail: Over 1,300 letters digitized, open access from U-M Library | University of Michigan News
peter.suber's bookmarks 2025-03-27
Summary:
"The University of Michigan Library has digitized, transcribed and categorized more than 1,300 fan letters sent in response to the 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds.”
The entire collection of letters, part of the university’s Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Collection, has been published open access for researchers and fans around the globe. The letters are just one segment of the U-M Welles archive, the largest in the world....
“I thought it would take a couple of weeks to complete and was planning with my colleague to take turns answering questions and monitoring responses that came through the site,” said Vince Longo, who began working on the project as a U-M graduate student and is now an assistant professor at Western Michigan University. “But when we checked Zooniverse the next day, everything was transcribed within 24 hours, and we even got complaints that there weren’t enough letters, or enough categories to choose from. It just shows this is one of those energizing stories in the world.” ..."